Summary
Impact: Elevation of Privilege. Microsoft rating: Important. Not known to be exploited — Exploitation Unlikely. Customer action: Required.
Details
According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R) and privileges required is Low (PR:L). What does that mean for this vulnerability?
An authenticated attacker could place a malicious file on the path to the project directory and then wait for a user with admin privileges to create a Visual Studio project to gain elevated privileges.
What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability?
An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain administrator privileges.
Security updates
15.9.77 — https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes
16.11.52 — https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2019/release-notes-v16.11
17.10.20 — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2022/release-notes
Vulnerabilities 1
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High 7.3
Visual Studio Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Improper access control in Visual Studio allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally.
Revision history
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#1
Information published.
References
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CVE-2025-55240 Visual Studio Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability - HTML
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2025-55240
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Microsoft Exploitability Index
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/exploitability-index?rtc=1
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Microsoft Support Lifecycle
https://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle
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Common Vulnerability Scoring System
https://www.first.org/cvss